


The Boy with the White Delphiniums

by Kainosite



Category: Political RPF - UK 20th-21st c.
Genre: M/M, Oxford
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-19
Updated: 2015-12-19
Packaged: 2018-05-07 18:19:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5466365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kainosite/pseuds/Kainosite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On a visit back to Oxford, David meets a pretty boy at a lousy party.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Boy with the White Delphiniums

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> Warning for some oblique discussion of bullying, but that's more or less de rigueur for Oxford-era Osborne fics, isn't it?

They meet for the first time at a dinner in Oxford, some Bullingdon or Bullingdon-adjacent event a few years after David’s graduation. David has come up with friends, paying a weekend visit to someone’s girlfriend who is still at university. In the evening the happy couple steal away for some private recreation and leave the rest of them to find their own entertainment. At loose ends, they unwisely allow themselves to be roped into attending the Club’s latest shindig as guests of honor, old boys returning to the fold.

David, lofty man of the world that he is at twenty-four, finds the whole thing tedious and juvenile. He found the Bullingdon Club’s concept of a good night out obnoxious enough while he was still a member. From the perspective of Downing Street the politics of Oxford’s undergraduate social scene seem absolutely ridiculous. On Tuesday morning he’ll be back in London briefing the Prime Minister for PMQs, and yet he’s expected to sit through this? Perhaps this is why his attention wanders away from his dining companions and catches on the boy at the far end of the table.

George has at this stage an impressive mop of Byronic curls, but it’s not this that draws David’s eye—they’re just coming out of the eighties, and a tousled head of artfully blown hair is still the norm rather the exception. What catches his attention is the expression of wary, resentful resignation on George’s face, instantly familiar to any younger sibling of an accomplished older brother. It’s the look one gets when one is hanging out with the accomplished older brother’s accomplished older friends and the inevitable gentle teasing has shaded into cruelty, but because one wants to impress them, and maybe a little bit to _be_ them, one can neither retaliate nor leave, and must instead sit in their company grimly awaiting the next blow.

David doesn’t know and cannot guess the extent of the bullying—that’s a story he’ll draw out of George years later, slowly and in bits and pieces like shrapnel from a wound—but he can see quite clearly that something is wrong, that what should be a convivial party amongst friends is something very different for the boy with the dark curls. Although he’s not usually the touchy-feely type, he feels a distinct pang of compassion. Perhaps it’s just the natural sympathy aroused by finding someone else who is enjoying this rotten dinner as little as he is. George looks up and catches him staring, and their eyes meet for a moment before David quickly looks away and tries to drag his attention back to his soup and his friends’ conversation.

When he goes to take a leak later he finds George in the corridor outside the toilets, parked beside a little mahogany table holding an oriental vase of silk delphiniums. He’s leaning against the wall in a pose of calculated casualness and trying desperately to look as though he has some good reason to be there and he’s not just trying to postpone the moment when he has to go back in to dinner. It’s a hopeless endeavor—the artificial flowers are barely interesting enough to justify their own presence, much less anyone else’s—and they experience a dreadful jolt of mutual embarrassment, George to be discovered, David to discover him.

He is precisely the wrong person to have found him. David’s friends or one of the third years from his end of the table might have passed by without noticing anything amiss, and George’s “friends” already know his secret. But it is mortifying to be exposed before a stranger, and David can’t forget what he saw at the table or conceal his pity. George, judging from the way humiliation and fear and a terrible helpless fury flash across his face before he manages to restore the mask of bored amusement, can’t conceal anything at all.

He’s a strikingly pretty boy, now that David can see him up close. Perhaps that’s the reason they’ve targeted him. Not handsome, he doesn’t have the bone structure for it, but he has that soft, androgynous beauty some young men develop as they’re coming out of adolescence. Piercing dark eyes, raven hair, pouting ruby lips and a porcelain complexion—the corridor is poorly lit by a few wall sconces, but even by their dim yellow glow he’s stunning.

And he’s very good at leaning casually against walls. The pretense may be unconvincing, but the pose is flawless. His time with the Bullingdon Club has taught him something, at least. It’s all very decorative and very Victorian: the soft light, the Chinese vase, the spray of white flowers, George with his red lips and his fall of dark curls, and David feels the stirring of a baser instinct than compassion.

“You look like a Stevens painting,” David says, putting on his friendliest smile to diffuse the tension.

George looks startled for a moment, then glances down at the vase by his elbow and laughs. “If that’s meant to be a chat-up line you might want to pick a less obscure reference.”

“Ah, but you understood it, so I made the right choice. Clearly a man of culture.”

He realizes he’s forgotten to deny it was a chat-up line, but it’s too late, George ducks his head and smiles at the compliment, and suddenly David wants very badly not to be the worst person who could have found him. He can’t apologize for the bullies, that will just make things worse, but maybe the wisdom of age and distance has something to offer.

“It’s funny,” he says casually, or at least as casually as he can, which is about as casually as George is lurking out in the corridor by a fake flower arrangement. “When you get out of here you realize that the world is very big and Oxford is very small. Four years ago I would have been the one organizing these dinner parties, but now the whole thing just seems like a stupid game for schoolkids.”

“Maybe that’s why I’m so bad at it. I was always crap at games at school,” George says. He tries to affect a light, bantering tone, but the bitterness leaches through. 

“And how many people have asked about your batting since you came here? Trust me, out there in the real world no one cares what clubs you were in at uni. You’ll have to win the approval of actual grownups, not overgrown children who judge a man’s worth by how many bars of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony he can belch when he’s plastered.”

David was aiming for ‘frank fraternal advice’, but he hits ‘pompous arse’ instead. It’s enough of a hook for George to recover some of his poise, and he smirks. “Grownups like you?”

“I don’t mean to brag,” says David, whose age and experience have not rendered him entirely immune to the desire to impress people, “but I do work for the Prime Minister. And I like to think my idea of entertainment is a little more sophisticated than getting shit-faced every weekend and smashing up restaurants.”

“Ever so mature,” George agrees. “And do you? Approve, I mean.” He tries to make a joke of it, but David can hear the desperation in his voice, the almost physical need to have some validation from someone, anyone at all, even a nameless stranger he’s met by chance at a party.

Physical needs. There’s an idea. David, who is slightly tipsy—it is a Bullingdon function after all—reaches out a hand before he can think better of it and tilts George’s chin up to look him in the eyes. “I’d say yes, but actions speak louder than words. Shall I prove it to you?”

George squeezes his eyes shut and gives a curt nod, so David leans in, braces his other hand against the wall, and kisses him.

George kisses back like he’s the one trying to prove something, to the bullies or maybe to himself. His hands latch on to David’s shoulders and he pushes against him so hard that David is forced to take a step backwards, pulling them both away from the wall. David brings his hands up to cup the back of George’s head, and as he strokes his hair the kiss grows less and less frantic until George breaks it off entirely and just leans his forehead against David’s, panting quietly.

George’s curls are as soft as they look. So are his lips. David is considering whether to try kissing him again when someone coughs behind him.

“Terribly sorry to interrupt, chaps, but you’re blocking the corridor,” one of the third years says, and they pull apart to let him through. David finally remembers the pressing demands of his bladder.

“I’m just going to go, um,” he says, gesturing toward the toilet.

“Oh. Right,” says George.

“But if you want to know what I think of you—I think we should do that again sometime.”

When he comes out again George has vanished, and he tries to tell himself he isn’t disappointed. What, was he expecting him to wait outside a toilet all night? This was all he wanted, to give the kid the courage to go back in and face his tormentors. He half manages to convince himself, and goes back to his seat feeling much better about the evening—if he’s done a good deed then at least it wasn’t a total waste, and he did get a very passionate kiss out of it. He’s tempted to look over at George from time to time to see how he’s getting on, but he heroically resists. No point in humiliating him all over again, if he isn't. It's time for them to go their separate ways.

After dinner the festivities collapse into the usual undergraduate chaos of too many people and too few cars, because someone left early without any of the chaps he’d brought along and left everyone else in the lurch and several of the other drivers are of questionable sobriety. George hovers on the outside of the milling circle of negotiations, not quite bold enough to break in and demand a place for himself but unwilling to be left behind. After watching this for a few minutes David taps him on the shoulder and offers him a ride home. There's only so much temptation a man can reasonably be expected to resist, and he's still in the grips of his compassionate impulse, not to mention the other one.

It’s a cool, wet evening in early summer. The scent of cut grass and new growth blows in through the open windows as they drive. David asks what George is studying, and they wind up spending the whole trip back into town talking about the dissolution of the monasteries. George is incisive and articulate, and he has a better grasp of the economics than David would have expected from a history student. It’s amazing how the tension that was vibrating through him like a bowstring at dinner just drains out of him with every mile they put between themselves and the restaurant.

Several times David considers asking George whether he’d like to come back with him instead. He’s too old for sneaking past college porters, but he’s staying with friends in Wheatley and no one will care if he brings a plus-one down to breakfast in the morning. But George is very young—dinner has convinced David that the gulf between himself and the undergraduates is vast—and a bit vulnerable, and he’s afraid George might mistake it for a pity-fuck, which he’s fairly sure it isn’t, or a demand to be repaid for his kindness, which it certainly isn’t. And once they get to Wheatley George will be trapped there, unable to get back to Oxford on his own until morning. David doesn’t want to take advantage of the situation or put him in a position where he feels he can’t refuse. So he says nothing and drops him back at Magdalen.

Still, he can’t help thinking wistfully about what might have been, and George is halfway to the college gate before David shakes off his reverie and remembers something he meant to ask.

“Wait!”

George stops dead in his tracks, almost like he was expecting David to call him back, and David thinks again of inviting him back to Wheatley, but it’s still a bad idea for all the reasons he’d thought of earlier. It wouldn’t be fair.

“I never caught your name,” he says instead.

“I suppose kissing outside the gents doesn’t lend itself to proper introductions,” George says. He comes trotting back to the car and sticks his hand through the rolled-down window. “It’s George. George Osborne.”

“David Cameron,” David says, shaking it at an awkward angle and managing to bang both of their wrists on the door frame. George retreats, rubbing his wrist, and they smile sheepishly at each other through the window.

“Listen, I don’t know what you’re planning to do when you graduate, but you’re obviously bright, and- Well, if you ever want to come work for the Conservative Party, look me up.”

George grins. “All right, it's a deal. Although you have an unusual strategy for recruiting.”

He won’t see or hear from George again for three years. The whole encounter ought to be forgettable: just two brief conversations and a kiss, at one of those parties where people do all sorts of mad things and forget about them in the morning, or at least try to until the restaurant sends them the bill or they get a call asking them to pick their friend up from A&E. But for some reason the memory lingers, and at odd times David finds his mind drifting to their meeting in the corridor, that sharp smile and those soft ruby lips. And when George does finally show up at Conservative Central Office, it feels like something inevitable, the last piece fitting into a puzzle or the completion of a circuit or the fulfillment of a prophecy.


End file.
